Both the Republican and Democratic conventions are now over. It is time for some additional reflections. First, as per the period of McGovern, the rainbow coalition, Jesse Jackson’s attempt to run and now Bernie Sanders, the reformist and populist left is left holding an empty balloon, deflated by promises to build a movement or a political revolution. These promises are nothing other than demagoguery. Some of these people will hibernate till the next election, hoping that we forget this election experience. Some will hop on the bandwagon of other insignificant candidates, still pushing their opportunist/populist political line.

This is a preliminary presentation aimed, primarily, at building a certain level of political unity with the objective of building a Proletarian Alternative in the belly of the beast. This is in no way directed at building our intellectual capacity outside or independent of our social practice. If we did that, the result would be an association of intellectuals with no political purpose and totally disconnected from social reality.

One of the principal objectives of all our organized work is to understand the reality we are in and will struggle to transform. If we cannot appropriate this reality to the best of our ability, how can we transform it? If we do not have a scientific interpretation of objective reality, how can we begin to define the ways of transforming it or build the necessary tools needed to transform it?

Proletarian theory is a science that contains two components: Dialectical Materialism [DM] and Historical Materialism [HM].

Dialectical Materialism is a scientific philosophy, meaning that, as opposed to many other philosophies that are based on superstition or metaphysical beliefs, it strives to give a scientific interpretation, situated in human history, to every real phenomenon. DM allows us to have the capacity to reach a relative understanding of the real world, of different existing phenomena, the development of these complex realities and the interrelationships, if any, between them.

The problematic of proletarian struggle can’t be appropriated independently or autonomously from the history of the proletarian movement, through the periodic stages of its development. Those stages determined the problems, their various manifestations, and the elaboration of concepts and theory needed to apprehend this reality. This development shaped the constant, unavoidable and necessary rectifications and transformations of our theory.

Historical Materialism is the science that uses DM in order to discover, comprehend and build a theoretical model of societal development. HM, as a theory, allows us to analyze a social formation and comprehend its diverse existing internal relations and the relations between different social formations HM enables us to achieve a relative understanding of history, how different social formations develop in different periods, through different conjunctures, and the effects of these conjunctures on these social formations.

HM also allows the proletariat to develop a scientific political line to defeat CAPITAL, its fundamental enemy. The source of this science is the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat; thus it is severely limited during a low level of proletarian struggle. This theory, this philosophy is the revolutionary scientific guide of the proletariat as the gravedigger of capitalism.